Javascript replace email addresses

Question

quick question - Why isn't this working?

I'm pretty sure that I've tested everything to no avail. I'm trying to basically add mailto links to any email that can be found.

It's not replacing the email links with the mailto a tags.

Thanks, Harry

$(document).ready(function() {
    var email_regex = /([a-zA-Z0-9._-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9._-]+\.[a-zA-Z0-9._-]+)/gi;

    var bodyText = $('body').html();
    var match = email_regex.exec(bodyText);
    // To do - Don't try it when there is already a mailto link, can probably just add mailto to the regex.
    for (var i = 0; i < match.length; i++) {
        bodyText.replace(match[i], '<a href="mailto:' + match[i] + '">' + match[i] + '</a>');
        console.log(match[i]);
    }
    $('body').html(bodyText);
    console.dir(match);
});

Answer 1

You should instead to this I suppose:

 var result = bodyText.replace(email_regex,'<a href="mailto:$1">$1</a>');
 console.log(result); // This two lines are enough.

Full code:

$(document).ready(function() {
    var email_regex = /([a-zA-Z0-9._-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9._-]+\.[a-zA-Z0-9._-]+)/gi;
    var bodyText = $('body').html();
    var result = bodyText.replace(email_regex,'<a href="mailto:$1">$1</a>');
    console.log(result); // This two lines are enough.
});

Answer 2

The first problem is that the g flag does not retrieve all matches at once. It merely allows to call exec() in a loop. You'd need:

var match;
while ( (match = email_regex.exec(bodyText)) !==null) {
}

The second problem is that replace() does not modify the original string. You'd need:

bodyText= bodyText.replace(match[i], '<a href="mailto:' + match[i] + '">' + match[i] + '</a>');

Still, you could easily get into an infinite loop this way. You'd need to work on a copy:

var newBodyText = bodyText;
...
while ( (match = email_regex.exec(bodyText)) !==null) {
    ...
    newBodyText = newBodyText.replace(...)
}
$('body').html(newBodyText);

Reference:

• String.replace()
• RegExp.exec()